KIBERA, Kenya—For years Mohamed Abdullahi and his young friends made a living beating up and robbing their neighbors here on the outskirts of Nairobi in one of Africa’s most desperate slums.
Sometimes, though, the victims fought back. Ten of Mr. Abdullahi’s fellow criminals were “brutally killed,” he told me. Some were stoned. “Mob justice,” Mr. Abdullahi [...]

KIBERA , Kenya —The government clinic gets a shipment of water purification tablets every three or four months. In a week or two the tablets are gone. And then the people here in this rambling slum on the edge of Nairobi are on their own.
So how bad is that? This is one of [...]

DUNGA, Kenya—It was shortly after daybreak and a long, wooden fishing skiff crunched up on the stony beach here along Lake Victoria. Women who sell fish in the market in nearby Kisumu swarmed the boat. They grabbed slippery Nile perch and tilapia and tossed them into their plastic baskets. Then they began haggling.
The catch that [...]

LUANDA KOTIENO, Kenya—The gray donkey stood passively, shifting a little now and then as a man in a deeply faded shirt strapped yellow plastic barrels of water on its back.
The man was a water merchant. He was working a few miles from this little ramshackle town in western Kenya at the edge of a pond [...]